This article reconsiders the significance of an episode of monstrous birth in Fisherton Anger, Wiltshire, in 1664. Tracing the influence of natural philosophical, spiritual, and providential impulses in extant accounts of the Fisherton birth, it suggests that in order wholly to comprehend this material it is necessary to move beyond debates about the ‘rise of science’. It therefore explores the contemporary claims made about the Fisherton monster against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggesting that the rampant politicization of monstrosity after the outbreak of war in 1642 provides the key to understanding the emphasis on different kinds of natural, spiritual, and moral truth in accounts of physiological abnormality after 1660. A case-study of early Restoration efforts to negotiate the instability of past events, this article further argues that the impulse to forget which underpinned the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660) found different expression elsewhere in the form of censorship and beyond the political sphere in the field of natural philosophy. Considered in light of this early Restoration culture of amnesia, the Fisherton monster embodies a series of attempts to forget the passions of a turbulent political past.

This analysis of the Anglo-French dispute over manpower resources in 1918, in the context of Germany's five Spring offensives on the Western Front, reveals the lack of effective and agreed policies. It examines from an alliance perspective a problem that has not before been so treated in print. After a brief account of the background to the crisis, the article discusses, first, the arguments presented in a French war ministry report on British manpower, and, second, the effects of the problems of transporting and deploying American troops. It goes on to examine some of the questions that were raised in consequence: industrial versus military mobilization; troop densities for a given length of line; and categories of fitness. Both British and French prime ministers spent much time and emotional energy in arguing about these matters. This was a dispute that was as bitter as it was pointless, because ultimately insoluble. Yet the efficient deployment of manpower resources was crucial to victory, and the dispute was dangerous for the maintenance of the coalition.

Most of the existing literature on the ‘Repeal Year’ agitation in Ireland explains the rise in popularity of the 1842–3 campaign for repeal of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in political and religious terms. This article argues that, in addition, the British government's economic policy of reducing tariffs in 1842 damaged Ireland's agricultural economy and increased popular support for the Repeal movement. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, this article shows that the tariff reductions and import relaxations of the 1842 budget had an immediate negative impact on Irish real incomes by reducing agricultural prices. A negative relationship between these prices and the Repeal rent, together with the economic rhetoric of Repeal in favour of protection, indicate a link between the economic downturn and the rise in the popularity of Repeal. This article concludes that Peel's trade policy changes of 1842 should therefore be added to the traditional religious and political explanations as a cause behind the sudden surge in popularity of the Repeal movement between 1842 and 1843.

Luther's early statements, such as that belief is a ‘free work’ and must not be coerced, gained crucial relevance in the juridical debates about the meaning of the Augsburg Peace of Religion in the empire. Christoph Besold was among those transforming the reformers' message into a legal claim of subjects against their governments, based on an alleged natural right to believe what one wants. He thus transferred Luther's claim based on the reformer's trust in the work of the divine word into a juridical claim for subjects against their civil and ecclesiastical magistrates. Besold's argument is thus an example of the important changes in political and religious thought developing within the genre of the German politica during the first half of the seventeenth century.

This review surveys recent developments in the historiography of the politics of alcohol in twentieth-century Britain. The ‘drink question’ has undergone a set of tumultuous shifts, beginning with the decline of the temperance movement after the First World War, diminished conflict in the interwar and post-1945 periods, and the revived concerns over consumption and harm in the late twentieth century. Historians have traditionally presented the drink question as a binary conflict between advocates and opponents of the liberal distribution of drink. Newer narratives question the assumed ‘rationality’ of modern approaches to alcohol, especially concerning the post-1970s public health model which has been increasingly understood as an indirect manifestation of the temperance movement. The concept of ‘moral panics’ has been frequently employed to frame the formation of public attitudes towards drink. The article argues that these multifarious developments illustrate how alcohol offers a unique vantage point into various social developments in modern Britain, including that of the changing role of the state, the contested nature of scientific knowledge, and the formation of public opinion. It also suggests that the historiography should overcome its narrow focus on alcohol in modern Britain by juxtaposing it with other substances, regions, and periods.

At the beginning of De jure naturae et gentium (1672), Samuel von Pufendorf proposed a radical dichotomy between nature and morality. He was followed down this arid path by his great admirer John Locke. This article begins by exploring their descriptions of this dichotomy, examining the ways in which human animals were supposed to haul themselves out of the push and pull of the mechanistic world in order to become free moral agents. The article then argues that bubbling up from within this principal account of morality is an alternative account according to which virtue seems to infuse nature, thereby blurring the lines between obligation and motivation, and refiguring the character of moral and political agency. In uncovering this refiguration, I highlight the importance of Aristotelianism and Stoicism for Pufendorf and Locke, suggest continuities rather than breaks between the natural lawyers of the seventeenth century and the theorists of moral sentiment of the next, and gesture towards a hitherto underappreciated discourse in early modern thought: the normativity of nature.

This article gives chronology, nuance, and context to an analysis of how early socialist attitudes to religion changed. It asks why socialists argued with increasing fervour between the early 1830s and 1848 that social reform had to be rooted in spiritual as well as moral values. Two of the largest groups, the Icarians and the Fourierists, moved from a rational deism to Christianity. Both were driven by the need to defend themselves from accusations of immorality levelled against Fourier and the Saint-Simonians because of their rejection of monogamous marriage. The Fourierists, strongly influenced by their dominant female members, transformed Fourier's diety into a Christian God. Cabet, under pressure of ‘moral outrage’ from his critics, did likewise and found that this corresponded to the experiences of the Icarians in their artisan organizations. The religion of the early socialists was a democratic and a pragmatic morality, derived from artisan corporations, and seen as a vital base for fraternal association which was their solution to the ills of society.

My first research for this lecture1 was into the name and fame of Lewis Fry, whom it commemorates. The university administration kindly told me that Lewis Fry played a leading role in Bristol's founding, such that a contemporary could call him ‘the father of the university’. It is a nostalgic thought today, for all ofus in British universities, that we once had anything so benevolent as a father. Our institutions now feel like orphans in a harsh world, whose only remaining relative – here (as Canon Chasuble would have hastened to add) I speak metaphorically, my metaphor is drawn from fairy-story – is an unloving and nagging step-mother. The more reason to honour and celebrate past benefactors of liberal education who had humane vision.

When Edmund Paston was at Clifford's Inn in the spring of 1445 he was firmly advised by his mother ‘to thynkk onis of the daie of yowre fadris Counseyle to lerne the lawe for he seyde manie tymis that ho so euer schuld dwelle at Paston schulde have nede to Conne defende hymselfe’. In this much-quoted remark as in other opinions her sound and sensible husband, judge William Paston, was far from being original. The advice was at least two centuries old, if not older; the popularity of law-books for their estate managers in the thirteenth century is evidence of how many landlords then took it to heart.1 A landowner's land was a permanent temptation for his neighbours; such legal knowledge in some degree was therefore vital to him or to his stewards for its defence. More violent action was restricted, if not wholly extinguished by twelfth-century legislation; but that legislation itself and later enactments provided new, more subtle and probably more certain ways of depriving an honest possessor of his property. And titles to land, complicated from the thirteenth century on by landowners’ increasing employment of the entail and the use, gave in the later Middle Ages ample scope for the dexterous at law. Lawsuits on three manors bought on dubious and complicated titles nearly doubled their cost for an over-eager Sir John Fastolf in the middle of the fifteenth century. As Agnes Paston told Edmund her son and as an anonymous versifier told other potential landowners, it was as well to beware.

An association between the prince of Wales and various opposition leaders is a recurrent feature of eighteenth-century politics. A politically active prince found little difficulty in securing a following among the politicians of the day; the glittering prospects of the ‘reversionary’ interest1 were an obvious lure, and an obvious basis for such a connexion. But this is not a complete explanation. The prince had also a considerable degree of patronage at his disposal, and could add a more immediate and concrete reality to promises for the future. A study of this patronage, its extent and its disposal, and more particularly the way in which it was exercised by Frederick, ‘Poor Fred’, throws much light on the connexion between the prince and his political friends, and contributes to an understanding of the place of Leicester House in the politics of the early eighteenth century.

Historians have long argued about the political career in Ireland of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford. Analysing the extent of his viceregal power in the 1630s and his relationship to political factions, this writing has focused on ‘high politics’, as captured in state papers, pamphlets, and private letters. This article focuses on less conventional sources like paintings and accounts of court ceremonies to try and clarify a vital question. In a fragmented colonial territory that the Stuarts were determined to turn into a kingdom, to what extent did Wentworth cast himself as a king? The article examines the sophisticated way that Wentworth elaborated on ritual forms already connected with the viceroyalty to associate his political persona with that of the monarch, with particular reference to his extraordinary inauguration in 1633. Wentworth's interest in painting is well known because of his celebrated patronage of Van Dyck. Less well known is the way that he extended the conventions of portrait painting into the third dimension through court ritual, particularly the practice of allusion to recognizable models, with all the implications for prestige that this entailed. Through ‘political aesthetics’ Wentworth made the allusion to kingship, to the point that enemies detected monarchical pretensions.

Between its first meeting in January 1664 and the final session held under unfree labour in December 1838, the volume of legislation passed by the house of assembly in Jamaica increased exponentially. As in Britain and Ireland, this reflected the growing administrative capacity and political power of the legislature and also the enormous demand for laws and law-making among local interest groups. The rise and fall of slavery and the slave society in the island was therefore underpinned in a large part by the power of its colonial legislature, which also operated within the broader transatlantic constitution structured by imperial politics and law. There was very little though to distinguish the house of assembly from others in British North America, at least in legislative terms, and even after the traumatic imperial disjuncture of 1783 the reformed transatlantic constitution continued to provide a supportive environment for the expansion of legislation within the island of Jamaica.

Between the early twentieth century and the 1960s, the Indian state began to incorporate the easternmost Himalayas. This article illuminates this state-making process by examining its material and communicative culture, embodied in tour diaries. These diaries were not private reflections written during one's spare time but the compulsory output of administrative tours. Often followed by more reflective notes, their perceived insights were used to determine local or general policy changes. Drawing on a literature that sees paperwork as constitutive of bureaucracy, this article argues that tour diaries exemplified and buttressed a certain form of frontier governance, marked by itinerancy and personalization well into independence. In their historical development, their language and materiality, their administrative usage, tour diaries embodied more than anything else the contingent, spatially uneven, and fractured nature of Indian state-making in the Himalayas, revealing the importance of process geographies anchored in paperwork circulation for its sustenance. Transmitted whole or extracted into policy files, diaries tied wandering officers together in a distinctive community of practice, policies, and ideas – preserving the fiction of the frontier state as a coherent whole in uncertain circumstances. As much as through maps, regulations, and routes, the frontier was made through writing.

This article seeks to explain some political and theoretical layers of Robert Persons's Conference about the next succession (1595). By examining a Latin manuscript version of the text which appeared in Rome in 1596 and by analysing the context in which this Latin version was composed and the aims which it was intended to fulfil, this article elucidates the political and religious implications of Persons's text, not only in the context of English or British debates over the succession to Elizabeth, but also in a European-wide scenario. Such an approach, I argue, can allow historians of early modern England to gain a deeper and wider understanding of English Catholicism and of its relevance in European political and religious history.

Though much has been written about Wyatt's rebellion, it remains controversial. There is, first of all, lively debate about the rebels' motives in rising against Mary Tudor in January and February 1554. It is generally agreed that some rebels wished only to force changes in royal policy, while others sought to replace the queen with her sister Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay, the earl of Devon. But, while D. M. Loades and his adherents contend that the rising was caused almost entirely by opposition to Mary's proposed marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, others argue – to varying degrees – that religion was significant and that many rebels were protestants seeking to thwart a catholic restoration.

This article examines the impact of England's first women justices of the peace (JPs) on the work of lay magistrates in the period 1920–50. It argues that the early women JPs (many of whom had been active in the women's suffrage campaign), and the organizations that they belonged to, helped to transform the institution of the lay magistracy by adopting a more ‘professional’ approach, evidenced in their willingness to educate and train themselves for their new role. In consequence, this article challenges conventional definitions of ‘professionalism’, arguing that, where the work of JPs was concerned, the boundary between ‘voluntary’ and ‘professional’ activities was less clear than might be supposed. Furthermore, the willingness of many women magistrates in particular (later followed by some of their male colleagues) to undergo training helped to ensure the survival of the lay element in the criminal justice system to the present day.

The problem that I am going to discuss this afternoon is one which must surely have exercised the minds of all those who have given a moment's thought to the financing of the Hundred Years' War. What conclusions have been reached it would be hard to say. For apart from two or three illuminating though hardly conclusive pages by Mr A. B. Steel, to whom my indebtedness should soon be obvious, nothing seems to have been printed on this subject in recent times. Yet unless we have some idea why men lent large sums of ready money to the English kings of the later Middle Ages, we must approach the political history of the period at a considerable disadvantage. To an increasing extent as the fourteenth century advanced and preponderantly throughout the course of its successor these lenders were natives and drawn from all sections of the propertied classes. The king's treatment of his creditors was therefore bound to affect his relations with his most powerful subjects. It would be surprising if his success or failure in meeting his obligations did not markedly influence their attitude towards his rule.